Friday, June 27, 2025

Lance Bush on justification, truth, and intuitions

 
27:15–29:15
 
"I don't believe in analytic accounts of justification either, I just completely reject them. I think what philosophers tend to be talking about is nonsense; I don't need justification for beliefs. I build a system on pragmatic grounds; I act based on what I expect to yield consequences that are conducive to my goals. I don't need any sort of extraneous permission. So I can give a pragmatic account of justification . . . but I'm talking about something that probably functionally and very much so philosophically is quite different from their accounts of justification. . . . It looks to me like a lot of analytic philosophers want some sort of permission to hold a view. I don't need reality's permission to hold a view. Let's say I'm a complete instrumentalist about my beliefs and I just go around believing things that are useful to me, and someone comes along and says, 'Yeah, but that belief isn't justified.' Okay. Well, what happens if I ignore it? Nothing. If you act like a pragmatist and ignore non-pragmatic conceptions of justification, there are no consequences to this. There's none! There aren't consequences. So I don't care, because I care about the consequences of my actions. So these non-pragmatic conceptions of justification are practically irrelevant and I don't care about them. Someone could say, 'Ah, but they're true!', okay well your truths don't matter to me. And if someone says 'Yeah but it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter because our quest is to figure out what's true', great, you're operating on a non-pragmatic conception of truth. I reject that as well, so I don't care about that either. . . . I don't believe in correspondence theory . . . So the whole thing is this system that they're operating within where I reject the whole system."
 
Continuing (29:38–30:29): 
 
"But for philosophers that take non-pragmatic approaches, I'm not obligated to abide by their metaphilosophy anymore than they're obligated to abide by mine. What you won't see me doing, at least I don't think so, is going around insisting that if you're not a pragmatist, like you're doing it wrong and you could only do things correctly if you're doing them the way I do. Now, there may be a sense in which I think that that's true, again pragmatically true—I mean it's almost trivially pragmatically true—but I try to be self-aware enough to realize when people are approaching philosophy from a different metaphilosophical perspective and be mindful of that fact and pivot to a discussion about metaphilosophy when it becomes appropriate. But a lot of people that work within conventional mainstream metaphilosophies, they don't see it as metaphilosophy, they're just doing philosophy and if you're not doing what they're doing, you're doing it wrong, you're not doing it at all."
 
I'm on board with the consequentialist aspects of what Lance is saying. And maybe a hard consequentialist position like the one I take leads to a pragmatic theory of truth and justification. I'm aware of Shamik Dasgupta's defense of a pragmatic theory of truth in this paper "Undoing the Truth Fetish." I have yet to analyze his arguments in that paper. So I don't know where I will land on the issue of truth and justification ultimately (or would land given enough time, research, thought, etc.).
 
Where I am at the moment though is that saying "My beliefs aren't justified and I don't care" is exactly as crazy as it sounds. I'm sure Lance can appreciate how it sounds to say "I don't need justification for my beliefs." It sounds, well, crazy. Saying "I don't need justification for beliefs" sounds like saying "I cannot be wrong" or "I don't need reasons to think that something is true to be convinced that it is true or is probably true." Again, that sounds crazy. But if I learned more about Lance’s views then maybe what he's saying wouldn't sound crazy at all.
 
It seems to me that at the heart of justification is this worry of arbitrariness: Imagine philosophers saying "I believe in a..." 
 
Philosopher 1: "...Correspondence theory of truth."
 
Philosopher 2: "...Pragmatic theory of truth." 
 
Philosopher 3: "...Deflationary theory of truth."
 
Philosopher 4: "...Primitive theory of truth." 
 
Philosopher 5: "...Semantic theory of truth."
 
Philosopher 6: "...Coherence theory of truth."
 
Philosopher 7: "...Performative theory of truth." 
 
Philosopher 8: "...Constructivist theory of truth."
 
Philosopher 9: "...Pluralist theory of truth." 

My goal is to believe what’s true about truth. Given that goal, which view of these should I take? Or should I take none of them? 

Here’s an idea: I will assign a number 1–9 to these views and use a random number generator to select a view randomly and I will believe whichever view is selected. You might complain that such a view would not be justified, but I don’t care. My beliefs can be totally arbitrary and that’s fine by me.

Not only would it be crazy to do this, it would be impossible. I can’t believe a philosophical view unless it makes sense to me. The "making sense" part is why reasons are needed. Reasons explain someone’s belief in x rather than y. Again, reasons are answers to 'why' questions, which makes them a kind of explanation. (So in cases where internal explanations aren't needed, like in non-propositional beliefs, reasons aren't needed. But those beliefs still have explanations, say in evolutionary terms.)

I think the problem of evil shows that a perfect being does not exist. Imagine if my true answer to someone asking why I think that is "I don’t care." That would be a bad answer. It would be so bad in fact that it would call into question whether I really believe what I claimed to believe, because, really, it’s not possible to have the answer "I don’t care" if I have reasons to believe my claim; the reasons are the answer! That's why, and how, I believe.
 
Being a bit tongue-in-cheek, imagine I said: I am converting to Nazism. Why? Well, haven't you heard? Justification is not needed! I don't need an answer. 
 
This would just be nonsense, because this is not how belief works. You can't convert to an intellectual position (like a philosophical or political position) without having an answer to the question of why you are convinced that that position is better than alternatives. (I’m not talking about social conversion, but doxastic conversion.) Whether the answer is justifying depends on whether the answer is any good. Does Lance think the answers moral realists give to challenges to moral realism are any good? I would guess not. So doesn't he accept the notion of good answers?

P.S. Before the above discussion, Lance talks about and denies the reality of intuitions, or as Huemer defines calls them, "intellectual seemings."
 
Curiously, within the quote at top Lance uses the phrase "it looks to me", which looks to me like an intuition marker. So it seems to me that an intuition is a seeming ("intellectual seeming" is redundant), which is something you are inclined to believe, agree with, or act as if you believe, but if asked why you believe that thing you wouldn't be able to articulate a clear answer, at least not without doing some serious work first.
 
In this episode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFuRH--n2o,  roughly around the 1h:30m mark, Alex Malpass says that intuitions are unreliable and count very little, with seemings acting as something of a practical tool for moving on from intractable problems of skepticism. I'm inclined to agree with that, though I think Huemer would accuse Malpass of self-defeat because Malpass is relying on his seemings when downplaying seemings.
 
In any case, if intuitions are beliefs you believe but can't quite articulate why, then they are in a sense unjustified beliefs (using a reasons-based sense of justification). But if you hold the belief only very lightly, then you're not making the mistake of believing in a way that's disproportionate to the evidence or reasons to believe.
 
It can be worth holding onto beliefs you can't articulate reasons for because 1) you can't help but hold the belief, even if only very lightly, and 2) there may be reasons within the vicinity that do justify that belief, reasons that explain why it was that the belief seemed true to you to begin with.
 
So with intuitions there's this idea of subconscious belief or subconscious understanding involved; to have an intuition is to be subconsciously aware of certain reasons to believe something, but those reasons are not explicit in your mind. (Haven't you had the experience of reading a philosopher who articulates something you already agreed with, but couldn't articulate?) 
 
Back in school sometimes I would answer a math question intuitively. If you were to ask me "Why is that your answer?", I would have said "I don't know, but it feels right", and often I would get math questions right when operating by this feeling. Similarly we hear of "intuition-based" chess players who don't calculate captures or board-states but instead play moves that feel strong and avoid moves that feel weak. It's possible to be subconsciously attuned to a truth without being able to consciously explain it, which is why intuitions are worth exploring to bring out the understanding (or misunderstanding) that was lying underneath.
 
But I'd agree with Malpass (or what I take he'd agree with) that until that exploration has been done, and the reasons for the belief are uncovered, the intuition by itself is not worth anything other than as a jumping off point.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

The Absurdity of Life Without God (June 2025)

 
1) Is Craig saying that all humans prior to Christianity should have thrown themselves off cliffs in despair over the meaninglessness of their lives? Because that would be a clearly false thing to say.
 
2) In response, Craig might say something to the effect of "Humans prior to the revelation to the Jews or prior to the Gospels could have believed in God as revealed by creation."

But this would be a bad response for the following reasons:

A) Craig himself says that you need God and an afterlife for reality to be ultimately meaningful.[*1] But Orthodox Judaism doesn't teach an afterlife, and no clear teaching of the afterlife can be found in the Old Testament. So really, even belief in the God of the Old Testament, the true God, is not enough on Craig's view for life to be meaningful. I'll say that again: Even believing in the true God is not enough to live a meaningful life on Craig's view! So all the figures of the Old Testament were living meaningless lives, including Joseph, Abraham, and Moses? Really?
 
B) The God revealed by creation is, like Hume points out, not clearly good nor evil, as life is rife with both good and evil. But if the God of creation is not clearly good nor evil, and is apparently indifferent to both our suffering and our joy, then there's no reason to think there will be an afterlife for our sakes.

More importantly, if there is no report of an afterlife revealed by God in a credible way, then there is no reason to think there is an afterlife. It would be pure speculation. So...
 
3) ...would Craig say it's okay to live a life that might be meaningful on speculation? Does life have to be absolutely certainly known to be meaningful (i.e. does God’s existence and an afterlife have to be known with certainty) for a person to rationally live it?

Surely Craig would not set the standard that high. Indeed Craig is infamous for saying that when it comes to pragmatic reasoning, the standard can be extremely low.[*2] As long as there is some chance that there is a god out there and an afterlife out there, then it's reasonable to live according to that chance. So as long as atheists aren't absolutely certain that there is no god and no universalist afterlife, as long as they believe there is a non-zero chance of these things, then they can live on the same kind of leap of faith that Craig champions when he says Christianity is worth believing in even if there were only a one in a million chance of it being true. And many atheists would admit that there is some chance of such a universal salvation, however small.

4) Is a naturalistic worldview unlivable? No! And shouldn't Craig know better, having debated however many naturalists at this point, who all clearly do not find naturalism to be unlivable? Is Graham Oppy, a “scary smart” atheist scholar, somehow irrational for living as a naturalist?

Craig claims that naturalists live as if their lives have meaning, but have no basis for this meaning. But that's not only mistaken, but I'd claim certainly mistaken. The basis for meaning that naturalists have is the same basis that all humans prior to Christianity had, and it’s the same basis that, ironically, even Christians have for meaning.
 
Why do Christians live their lives? Do Christians receive a letter from God in the mail that details their purpose on earth? Or do Christians receive a vision or a dream, or an auditory message from God that details their purpose on earth? Nope. Christians are left to figure things out on their own, the same as everyone else.
 
And so inevitably Christians end up living for: their jobs, hobbies, entertainment, family, friends, exploring the world, because their biology generates an internal pressure to survive, and so on, exactly the same reasons humans have always had for living.
 
You might say that Christians have uniquely Christian jobs like pastor, missionary, and Christian philosopher, but that's only very few Christians. Most Christians are like everyone else: Working some miscellaneous job that puts food on the table for the family. (By the way, why is God so okay with his followers working mundane jobs for decades and decades, knowing what that does to the soul, I have no idea.)
 
We are told in Revelation that in heaven there will be no more death or suffering. We are told that hell is a place of torment. This is a strikingly hedonistic system of value. If Christianity were anti-hedonism, then we could imagine heaven being filled with pain and hell being filled with happiness. After all, if it's things other than pain and happiness that form the basis of value, then heaven could be filled with those intrinsically good things (whatever they are) along with pain, and hell could be filled with those intrinsically bad things (whatever they are) along with happiness.  
 
As it stands, we don't find that description of heaven and hell in the Bible or in Christian tradition. So we're left with a hedonistic picture of Christian value. But if hedonism is true, then happiness forms the basis of meaning. That which is meaningful is that which makes life worth living, and vice versa (this is the meaning in life sense of meaning). Happiness makes life worth living. So that which imparts happiness imparts meaning. And this is exactly what we find in the world: all human motivation can be understood in terms of pursuing certain kinds of happiness and avoiding certain kinds of pain.
 
The reason why I say that it's certainly the case that life is meaningful is because not only is it certain that we experience happiness, but because it is certainly the case that our actions make a difference (this is the difference-making sense of meaning). Craig claims that our lives make no ultimate difference if death is the permanent end. But there is a difference, and a certain one at that, between happiness and pain. The real moments of real flourishing that real people really have—that's the difference-maker, and it's a difference that we have direct access to via immediate experience.[*3]

5) So a naturalistic worldview is certainly livable for the same reasons that life in general is livable, including Christian life. But is a Christian worldview livable? A person can find Christian worldviews to be unlivable for the following reasons:

A) To be a Christian you must select a denomination but it can seem like there are no good reasons to select one over the others.
 
B) When you try to do theology to discover which denomination is best, you discover that there are severe challenges to the coherence of all Christian doctrines, including the doctrines of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Salvation, Sin, Eschatology, Heaven, Hell, Creation, Faith, Ecclesiology, etc. 
 
B) There are moral horrors in the Old Testament, horrors that Craig happily defends.[*4]
 
C) Jesus says things that are arguably straight up false, including His teachings on divorce (Mt. 19:9), that the "meek shall inherit the earth" (Mt. 5:5), that "whoever is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23), "how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him" (Mt. 7:7), and "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12).
 
On that last one you might try to wriggle out of it by saying that it refers to only the disciples, but a) it specifies "the one who believes in me", not just the disciples, and b) the disciples did not go on to perform greater works than that of Jesus.
 
You might respond by saying "works" refers to spreading the gospel, and "greater works" refers to how greater numbers of people will be reached by the gospel than what Jesus reached during His earthly ministry. But the term for works, τὰ ἔργα, found in John 14:11, refers to miracles. 
 
D) If someone is committed to a pragmatic theory of truth, and if being a Christian is pragmatically false, then Christianity is false for that person. Some people have found being a Christian to be detrimental to their mental health (religious trauma, hell anxiety, etc.) and success in life. (Why would God give us this heuristic of looking to what works for guidance on what to believe and what to do with one’s life and then allow for Christianity to not work for so many people, I have no idea.)
 
E) Christianity commits one to unbelievable supernatural elements, including:
 
E.1 - Figures in the Old Testament living to hundreds of years;
E.2 - The Nephilim;
E.3 - The Divine Council;
E.4 - Angels;
E.5 - Demons;
E.6 - Satan as a demonic ruler of the world;
E.7 - Hell as a literal, physical place;
E.8 - Heaven as a literal, physical place;
E.9 - The bread and wine of the Eucharist being the literal body and blood of Jesus, if the Catholics are right about transubstantiation;
E.10 - Various miracle stories like talking animals, the flood, the plagues, Jonah and the Fish, pillars of fire, the miracles of Jesus, John's Revelation, etc.
 
F) Many folks who are LGBT report experiencing Christianity to be unlivable, and even non-LGBT folks find Christian ethics to be impractical and naive.
 
G) Infernalistic versions of Christianity are seen as unlivable because a) it's impossible to socialize with people you believe are going to hell; b) it's impossible to believe that the large majority of humanity is going to hell, including close family and friends; c) it's impossible to envision one being happy in heaven knowing so many people, or even a single person, is in hell.
 
6) Speaking of hell, life in hell is, if the accounts of the Bible and tradition accurate, not worth living. A life not worth living is a meaningless life. So life in hell is a never-ending meaningless life! So Infernalistic Christianity is far more guilty—infinitely more guilty—than naturalism of producing years of meaningless existence. If God as a perfect being entails that all existence is meaningful, and if life in hell is not meaningful, then God's existence entails that infernalism is false and there is no hell, an indictment of orthodox Christianity.
 
7) Not only does naturalism not entail a meaningless life, but Christianity does not entail a meaningful life. Christian belief can cause the believer to develop a sense that this life is pointless, because life doesn't truly begin until the end of the world and the new heaven and new earth come. This can cause the Christian to develop a lifestyle of passivity, of waiting for the end of the world. This is exacerbated by the pain of effort and risk of injury. Ambition and achievement go out the window, and the Christian lives an empty life waiting for God to do something or waiting for the Rapture – for life to really start. How tragic!
 
If Christianity ends up false, then these Christians will have wasted their one chance to fight for meaningful experiences in this life. Even if Christianity ends up true, it's still the case that these Christians failed to live well in this life. God, sensitive to these things, should encourage Christians to live for this world, say, by granting special protections to the Christian, allowing them to live more fearlessly. Instead, God allows Christians to be persecuted, martyred, and ridiculed for their beliefs. (And allows them to end up stuck in mundane jobs, as mentioned – an important point, considering how meaningless working a mundane job is, at least for those of us who dream bigger. Let me put it this way: Personally, if God revealed himself to me and gave me a dream job, I would believe in Him and devote myself to Him in a heartbeat, because that would be a fast way to know that God is real. Ironically though, such a dream job would involve doing philosophy research full time, research that happens to have led me to the conclusion that Christianity is almost certainly false).

8) Craig worries about atheists living an inauthentic life. Surely Craig can appreciate the fact that there are Christians and even pastors who live inauthentically? There are testimonies of pastors and seminary teachers who lose faith but keep the Christian mask on to keep their employment. That’s an inauthentic life, not because it’s inwardly atheistic, but because it’s inwardly atheistic in combination with being outwardly Christian!
 
If the concern is strictly with authentic living, then you would demand many people to leave Christianity, because their Christian life is not authentic. It is exactly because of problems of authenticity (both in terms of one's own cognitive dissonance as well as the observed cognitive dissonance in other nominal Christians) that many people stop going to church and leave religion altogether. How many of us have experienced the inauthenticity of Christians, who preach one thing but practice another? I suspect it is exactly because of the problems mentioned of the livability of Christianity that results in these hypocrisies. The falsity of Christianity causes a clash between reality and the Christian's beliefs, and these clashes often manifest in contradictions in the Christian's attitudes and behaviors.
 
Living authentically includes living according to what you believe to be true, and not according to what you want to be true or according to what people around you pressure you into believing. The echo chambers of church life can produce intellectual dishonesty. The desire to be with God, for heaven to be real, for there to be ultimate justice, and the desire for one's devotion to a religion to have not been a waste, can each produce bias that encourages someone to dishonestly stay in their worldview. If Christians were honest, they would realize that 1) They want Christianity to be true more than anything, and 2) This produces a deep bias that seriously compromises the intellectual honesty of the Christian. Do you truly actually believe that Christianity is true, or are you just in it out of fear of death, or desire to see a loved one again? (I don't mean this in a patronizing way in the least. When I was a Christian I wanted to be with God more than anything, and in some sense I still feel that way, although I also grapple with Graham Oppy's remarks on the irrationality of wanting God to exist. See "Naturalistic Axiology", Chapter 5 of Four Views on the Axiology of Theism.)

 *1 - See Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, pg. 74: "So it's not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither."
 
 
*3 - You might think of flourishing and suffering as more sophisticated and involved notions of happiness and pain, and it's really flourishing, not happiness per se, that we should maximize, and it's really suffering, not pain per se, that we should minimize. A very rough approximation of flourishing might be like the following:
 
A human is flourishing when:
 
1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
 
2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.
 
3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.
 
4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.
 
5) The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.

6) The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just lower-order happiness.
 
Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for suffering. Note: I'd claim that we have direct access to whether we are happy or in pain, but we don't necessarily have direct access to whether we are flourishing or suffering.
 
*4 - See "W.L. Craig Defends the Slaughter of Canaanite Children" on the @CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel.   

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Knowledge is justified true belief – blameless beliefs vs justified beliefs

Dad puts on the coffee. Mom puts laundry in the dryer. By coincidence, the timing is such that the dryer beeps to let us know it's done at the same time the coffee machine would normally beep to let us know that the coffee is done. But this time, the coffee machine fails to make a sound to signify that coffee is ready – the machine has worn down. By coincidence again, the laundry machine beep and the coffee machine beep sound very similar. So dad, sitting in his living room chair, hearing the laundry machine go off, understandably concludes that the coffee is done. And he's right – it is done. But if you were to ask dad, "Why do you think the coffee is done?", he would say "Because I heard the deal go off." But that's not true. What he heard was the laundry machine. So he gives a false reason for his belief. False reasons (answers to why questions) can never be good reasons to believe. Sure, it's understandable that dad would conclude what he did. But it's not, as it turns out, reasonable. Understandable belief and justified belief are not the same.

In the classic example of the broken clock, when you ask the person, "Why did you believe the time is 1 p.m.?", their answer is "Because the clock said 1 p.m." But that's not true. The clock doesn't say that the time today is 1 p.m. It says that the time yesterday was 1 p.m. at the moment the clock stopped working. Typically, clocks tell you the time of the day, which is why it's understandable to conclude that the clock is speaking of today. But when clocks stop working, they tell you the time of whatever day they stopped working. (See Bogardus & Perrin, "Knowledge is Believing Something Because It’s True". The clock reads 1 p.m. because the time was 1 p.m., not because it is 1 p.m.)

There are false understandable beliefs, which we can call false blameless beliefs, or understandably false beliefs or blamelessly false beliefs or innocently false beliefs, something to that effect. But being blameless in your believing doesn't make you justified in your believing. Humans may have been, at one point or another, blameless in their beliefs in gods, aether, miasma, phlogiston, geocentrism, or what have you, but these beliefs were never justified. Having an understandable or blameless belief is to have a justified belief in the internalist sense, which is why you can have internally "justified" false beliefs. But internalism is false when it comes to the kind of justification needed for knowledge.

We can think of the two kinds of justification (internalism vs externalism) as answers to different questions: is this person's reason for believing a good (i.e. true) reason? If yes, then their belief is justified (external). Is this person's believing an indication that there is something wrong with them, such as being intellectually vicious or stupid? If not, then their belief is justified (internal). So the two senses of justification are compatible.

Luck dissolves knowledge because luck dissolves justification. Justification cannot be arbitrary, and lucky beliefs are only true arbitrarily. What we want is to have the least arbitrary possible beliefs.

To illustrate this you can think of Christian denominations. Why be Episcopalian when you could be Methodist? Why be Roman Catholic when you could be Anglican? From the outside looking in, it can seem painfully arbitrary as to which denomination you should join. We know intuitively that arbitrariness destroys justification, which destroys any chance of you having arrived at the truth in any secured way. There is no reason to think that one denomination is true above the others. What you're saying, essentially, is either that you 1) Have yet to see any arguments for any denomination, in which case it would be arbitrary for you to pick one over the others; or 2) You have seen arguments on behalf of various denominations but you don't think any of them are any good. Good arguments supply good reasons, and good reasons form the exact chain or link you are looking for to remove arbitrariness. This is a link between truth and your belief. This is exactly what justification is meant to be: the link between what's true and what you believe, the link that explains how you came to believe in the truth rather than a falsehood. (And this is why psychoanalysis is essential to explaining opposing beliefs. You can't explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth, so instead you explain them in terms of their psychological appeal or something like that. Note that explaining opposing beliefs in terms of psychology need not be belittling; wrong beliefs can, again, be blameless and not reflect poorly on the believer in any meaningful way. The point is the simple fact that you cannot explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth [unless you're prepared to accept a dialetheia in that situation].)

For those folks with strong internalist intuitions, eliminating arbitrariness requires knowing that you know. After all, if you don't know that there is such a link between the truth and your belief, how can you know whether your belief is arbitrary or not, and, therefore, whether your belief is justified or not?

But there are reasons to think that you can eliminate arbitrariness without being aware of the elimination. This is a standard objection to internalism: animal knowledge. The lion knows the outline of his territory. How does the lion know this? Because the truth of the lion's (non-propositional) belief explains the lion's belief. The lion has a properly functioning brain which gives the lion access to highly reliable faculties of perception and memory. The connection between the truth and the lion's belief is non-arbitrary because it is mediated by a properly functioning brain capable of allowing the lion to grasp, understand, and remember its environment.

Laurence BonJour says the following about the objection from animal belief against internalism (Epistemology, Second Edition, pgs. 206–7):

"I once owned a German shepherd dog named Emma. . . . She understood a wide range of commands, seemed to exhibit an excellent memory for people and places . . . and could be amazingly subtle and persistent in communicating her desires . . . Anyone who observed her very closely would, I think, have found it impossible to deny that Emma had conscious beliefs and desires, together with other conscious mental states such as excitement or fear. But did Emma have any reasons or justification for her beliefs? Did she have knowledge? . . . despite her intelligence, it is hard to believe that Emma engaged in very much or indeed any reasoning, and still harder to believe that she was capable of understanding complicated arguments. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Emma could have even understood the basic idea of having a reason for a belief, an understanding that seems to be required for her to have had fully explicit access to any reasons at all. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Emma had no justified beliefs and hence no knowledge, a result that is alleged . . . to be highly implausible. Surely, it is argued, Emma was justified in believing and . . . even . . . knew such things as that there was a squirrel on the other side of the quad . . . or that the person at the front door was her good friend Marc . . ."

That applies to perceptual, non-propositional beliefs (the kind animals have). What about metaphysical, propositional beliefs? Something similar applies. Knowledge of truths about meaning requires "perceptions" of meaning – faculties for understanding, logic, language, and truth. Just as a properly functioning brain eliminates arbitrariness in perception beliefs, so too does it eliminate arbitrariness in metaphysical beliefs. This is where reasons and arguments come into play. Reasons and arguments are part of that "perceptual" chain, analogous to how light and the function of the eye are part of the perceptual chain that gives rise to our true perception beliefs. 

And as Bogardus / Perrin say at the end of the paper cited above, you don't need to know that you have knowledge in order to have knowledge, because, as they say, knowing is believing because it's true; i.e., the truth of your belief plays a central role in explaining why you believe it.

So I see two options here: explanation-first and reason-first. 

Explanation-first justification says 1) knowing A is believing A because A is true, and 2) when you believe A because A is true you will have a true (and relevant) answer to the why question ("Why do you believe A?"), and that(those) true answer(s) constitute the good reason(s) for why you believe. Explanation-by-truth entails good reasons (for propositional beliefs).

(This assumes the item of knowledge is propositional; non-propositional beliefs don't have and don't need reasons [non-propositional beliefs do have explanations, which, like reasons, are answers to why questions; reasons are internal, agential / personal explanations])

Reason-first justification says that 1) knowledge is justified true belief, with justification entailing having a true answer to the why question, and 2) for the truth of that answer to play a central role in explaining why you cite it as your answer to the why question. Good reasons entail explanation-by-truth (for propositional beliefs). 

(BonJour also notes that internalism and externalism may be compatible, addressing separate issues: pgs. 215–16.)

Questions to ponder:

a) Are there non-propositional beliefs?

b) Do non-propositional beliefs have reasons? Can they?

c) Do animals have reasons for why they believe (if they have beliefs)? Or do animals have non-propositional beliefs, which do not require, and cannot have, reasons?

d) Justification is the link between the truth and your belief such that your belief is non-arbitrary. To truly eliminate arbitrariness, must you be aware of that link? That is, must you know that such a link has been established to eliminate arbitrariness? If yes, then what is this "knowing"? How can you know such a link has been established? And does this apply to all kinds of beliefs, or only propositional beliefs? After all, it doesn't seem like animals are aware of such links, and yet surely animals have knowledge of whether a predator is chasing them, what's good to eat, of which member of their tribe is their mother, etc.

e) Do propositional beliefs require internal justification (i.e., good reasons)? If yes, is it because they are propositional, and propositional beliefs, to be non-arbitrary, require a connection to the truth that only reasons can provide?

f) Or is internal justification purely related to the blameworthiness of someone's beliefs? (i.e. If one of your beliefs is not justified in the internalist sense, then does that mean that that belief says something bad about you as a truthseeker, by, for example, indicating a lack of intellectual virtue on your part?)

g) Does explanation-by-truth entail having good reasons for propositional beliefs? Or does having good reasons for one's propositional beliefs entail explanation-by-truth? (i.e. Are good answers good because they are true and because their truth explains why they are given as answers?) Or is justification just explanation-by-truth all the way down, or just having good reasons all the way down? Or none of the above? 

Friday, June 20, 2025

Free Will: Still Not Real (reacting to Emerson Green)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBl0I7kTXo8 

"Dennett of course doesn't mean that one can be the author of their thoughts or desires in the maximalist sense, but so what?"

So what is that your actions don't say anything about you in that case, only about what you have. You can describe someone in terms of their non-essential properties, whether they are virtuous or vicious in this or that way. That's obviously important as it lets you know what to expect of their behavior, whether to stay away from them or whether they are safe (or whether they would make for a good interlocutor in a conversation or just resort to name-calling).

But descriptions of non-essential properties are not descriptions of essential properties... obviously. If my essential property is my subjectivity, then everything else about me is non-essential, something I have but not am. (And this is why trying to solve free will without first solving personal identity will never work, I think. How can I make sense of what it means for me to be blamed if I don't know what 'me' is?)

"If I'm not the source of my actions because I didn't self-generate my own nature ex nihilo, then the hose isn't a source of water . . . I think to say that it's false that the hose is a true source of water has some pretty absurd implications if you follow it through . . ."

I'm happy to say that the hose is a source of water, because it's not a source in any sense that gives me reason to be dissuaded from my free will skepticism.

In tort & criminal law you have the "but-for" test to determine factual causation. Ex. But for the fact that I acted (or failed to act) as I did, the injury would not have happened. So my action (or failure to act) is the factual cause of injury. (That's not enough to determine legal responsibility, as my conduct has to be a proximate cause, or I have to have a duty to act, etc. But I digress.)

So the hose is a source of water in the sense that it "passes" the but-for test; but for the hose, I would not have access to water (or, I would have one fewer access points to water).

Likewise, our conduct can pass the but-for test. But that doesn't mean we're free; it doesn't mean that my actions say anything about me even if my actions say something about what I have. And what I have is perfectly morally relevant when it comes to blame, praise, responsibility, punishment, and so on. Like Robert Sapolsky says, if a car has no brakes, you don't let it out onto the roads and risk hurting someone. Likewise, it makes perfect sense to lock up people for the safety of others (and, hopefully, for improving the quality of the incarcerated person so that they can re-integrate into society. But we know that the US prison system couldn't care less about that part). We "praise" (recognize the quality of) cars that function well and "blame" (recognize the poor quality of) them when they don't. We can explain our recourse to praise and blame this way, as a recognition of quality rather than as an accusation of ultimate sourcehood. Indeed, it is by someone's proximate sourcehood that we come to recognize the quality of their kindness, moral reasoning, emotional stability, etc.—qualities they inherited from circumstances.

I'm convinced (any reason why I shouldn't be?) that free will skepticism can make perfect sense of common sense notions of responsibility, blame, praise, punishment, everything, whether in law or moral dilemmas. (Obviously, with the exception of retributive punishment specifically. That doesn't make any sense.)

What explains these dispositions? Where do they come from? Do we choose our dispositions, or are they products of factors beyond our control? It seems to me that compatibilism always kicks the can down the road. Whichever criterion of freedom they cite as the Real Freedom, whether that be acting on desire, or acting on your second-order desires, or acting on self-endorsed values, or acting according to your own sensitivity to reasons, or acting on your own dispositions—for any freedom criterion N, the further question can be asked of what caused N, and we can imagine Pereboom-style scenarios where someone has N and yet intuitively does not have free will, because N was caused by circumstances beyond their control, and the most core intuition we have (certainly, that I have) when it comes to free will is that it's not fair to blame someone for something beyond their control. Put another way, it's not fair to attribute non-essential properties to someone as if they are essential properties.

"We've got the free will we think we have . . ."

I don't think I have any free will. I hear this kind of talk – "We all act as if we're free..." Speak for yourself, I don't! "Given the illusion of free will, we have no choice but to act as if we are free." What illusion? I have no such illusion. My intuitions point me completely and totally toward free will skepticism. I'm happy to admit that I have freedom, which is probably what folks are referring to. Freedom in this sense refers to having options to choose from and the sense of choice that accompanies selecting one option over others. Sure, absolutely, I have that. But while freedom concerns the choices you have available to you, free will concerns the nature of the choice made—does your choice reveal something about you per se or merely about what you have, about your circumstances?

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Quotes on pain – John Green and Jordan Peterson

John Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTEhBL7CetU

Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DgBQ9N5qk 

"When people hear that their pain isn't real, they immediately disbelieve you because they know that their pain is real; it's the realist thing in the world." –John Green

YouTube: Mythical Kitchen, "John Green Eats His Last Meal", 10 June 2025, timestamp 29:27.

". . . actually, things do have meaning. The proof of that, the most direct proof, is pain. No one disbelieves in their pain. Descartes said "I think, therefore I am", but it's more of a religious statement, and you can derive this from many religions, that the fundamental truth is "I suffer, therefore I am." And I think the reason for that is because, I don't care what you don't have faith in. The one thing you believe in is your own pain. And pain is a form of meaning, and what alleviates pain therefore, and suffering, is also a form of meaning. And I would say that the primary religious injunction, along with telling the truth, is to do what you can to alleviate suffering. And I think the truth is actually a corollary of that, because untruth produces more suffering than truth." –Jordan Peterson

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:22:28.

"That's why so many religions, like the Buddhist religion, insists that existence is suffering. The reason for that, it's a claim about what's irreducibly real. Everyone acts as if their pain is real. It doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter what kind of materialist they are or what they think about the human soul, or anything like that. When it comes right down to it, there's nothing more real than pain." –Jordan Peterson (Emphasis in bold is mine.) 

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:45:50.

Bonus:

"One thing I've learned as a clinical psychologist is that you do not hit a target you don't aim for." –Jordan Peterson

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:34:15.

Monday, June 16, 2025

Bishop Robert Barron is wrong about some things

 
1) 19:25 - "To be is to be good. Whatever is, is good." This is clearly mistaken. Imagine being a Boltzmann Brain popping into existence, experiencing constant agony, and being unable to die, forever. In that case, clearly being is not good, as being enables the bad of unending suffering. Being is not even pro tanto (to an extent) good in that case. How could it be? It's wholly bad. The idea that good and being are convertible is just a confusion of what goodness is (i.e. something phenomenally defined, like color experience).
 
2) 19:45 - Pain is certainly intrinsically bad (even if extrinsically good for survival), but ontologically positive. So evils (bad things) are not always privations.
 
To lack money is to not have money. To lack a lack of money is to have money. To lack pain is to not have pain. To lack a lack of pain is to have pain. So pain is positive, just like money. 
 
3) Evolution provides problems for religious belief for at least four reasons:
 
A) It's strange that a good God would use such horrific means to create life—the constant cycle of pain, death, and killing required of evolution.
 
B) I'm not sure how connected the Catholic church was to creationism, but certainly there was (and still is) a connection between Protestantism and creationism. But if creationism is mistaken, then it's embarrassing that Christians would be led by the Bible to false scientific beliefs. If Christians can be so wrong about something they're so confident in, despite being supposedly led by the Holy Spirit, then what other things might they be wrong about?
 
C) If Genesis 1-11 is basically myth, then what other parts of the Bible are myth or metaphor despite being traditionally taken as literal? The Eucharist, perhaps?
 
D) If evolution explains life, then we face the concern of debunking arguments. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply. Catholics reject contraception and abortion. Isn't it convenient to have exactly the pro-reproductive values we'd expect you to have were those values selected for not by truth, but by survival pressures? Why believe that those pro-reproductive beliefs / practices are true and not merely selected?
 
1:14:19 – "Religion keeps reasserting itself." But there are religions other than Christianity. How is Islam possible from a Christian perspective? A unified explanation of religion appeals to evolution. Of course religion reasserts itself; it's a pro-social system, and evolution selects for pro-social systems. Christians have to appeal to ad hoc spiritual explanations for competing religions — it's demonic activity or Satanic influence that causes other religions to arrive. But if Christians take advantage of common sense psychological, sociological, and anthropological explanations for competing religions, then how do they make Christianity an exception to these explanations? It's special pleading.
 
4) 35:20 - It's controversial to say that our being is conditional. See: "Metaphysical Rationalism" by Shamik Dasgupta, or The Case for Necessitarianism by Amy Karofsky. Klaas Kraay shows a way the theist can accept modal collapse without giving up common sense modal intuitions in "Theism and Modal Collapse", though whether an imaginable world is actually possible will depend on whether it is part of a best possible theistic multiverse.
 
5) 1:25:41 – I'm personally certain that euthanasia can be justified. You'd think that someone like Bishop Barron who emphasizes the relinquishing of the self and the refusal of "caving in" on oneself would understand how profoundly wrong it is to try to squeeze every last drop of life at all costs, as if the preservation of the self is the most important thing when it is not. The medical cases become absurd, with us spending $100,000 in medical costs to stay alive for one last week in agony or in a half-lucid state only to die in a lonely, cold, sterile hospital room. (Nevermind the exorbitant costs for longer care, money that could seriously set up the lives of the grandchildren for success. I'm not saying money is more important than life. I'm saying paying for torture is a bad deal.)
 
Common sense end of life care options are nearly non-existent in the US. It would be infinitely more humane and meaningful for us to die surrounded by loved ones, at home, awake and able to say goodbye, when we are ready. (There's the rub – who is ever ready to die? That takes a level of maturity that few people have.) Is it really God's will for us to die slow, agonizing deaths alone in hospitals? Really?
 
You'd also think that religious people who believe that death is not the end and that staying alive in this world is not all that important would be all the more accepting of an "early" death. (I put 'early' in scare quotes because 'early death' implies there was more life to live, but you can't call it living when additional "life" brings nothing but pain, incapacity, and indignity to the patient).
 
Catholics would have us believe that Brittany Maynard was evil, corrupt, mistaken, irrational—even guilty of a mortal sin—for her choice to end her life "early" to avoid the horrors of dying from brain cancer. Nothing could be more obviously false. It takes a staggering bravery and emotional intelligence to face death head on and accept it rather than die kicking and screaming like most do. How darkly hilarious is it that the God who prohibits death with dignity is the same God who allows brain cancer, ALS, dementia, Alzheimer's, and all manner of degenerative disease that make death with dignity morally essential?

William Lane Craig on why there aren't miracles today

 
"God has given evidence sufficient for those with an open mind and an open heart, but it's sufficiently vague so as to not compel those whose hearts are closed."
 
This claim is problematic for a number of reasons.
 
1) If someone's heart is closed, then no amount of evidence would be sufficient. For example, if there were an absolute proof that Christianity is false, many Christians would probably just ignore it or claim it's not a proof because their hearts are closed to the possibility of Christianity being false. So if God wanted to prove that non-believers have closed hearts, God should provide such an overwhelming amount of evidence for His existence such that only a person with a closed heart could reject God. But we don't see that overwhelming amount of evidence. Indeed, given the problem of evil, we see an overwhelming amount of evidence that there is no loving God.
 
2) Belief does not compel a relationship. James 2:19 says "Even the demons believe". So God could make his existence undeniable knowing that mere belief is not enough for love, desire, allyship, and so on.
 
3) While belief in existence is not sufficient for a true relationship, it is, arguably, necessary. How can you have a relationship with someone who doesn't exist? How can you have a relationship with someone who might not exist? Even some Christians admit that God might not exist. So how can you act as if God does? You can only act as if God probably exists, but doesn't relationship require certainty in the existence of the beloved? Otherwise, you are only loving the idea of God, not the person (or persons) of God. But if that's right, then not only do Christians have to argue that Christianity is true, they have to argue that it is certainly true! That God certainly exists! No Christian can come close to meeting that standard.
 
4) A popular view in philosophy is called doxastic involuntarism, which is the view that we cannot choose what we believe. We cannot choose our intelligence, our background knowledge, or what arguments make sense to us. Since what we believe is a function of those things, we cannot choose what we believe. But if that's right, then all belief is compelled belief, compelled by circumstances beyond our control. God, who knows this, knows that by keeping the evidence for his existence vague he is compelling people to conclude that God does not exist, or probably does not exist, or just as likely exists as not, or only probably exists, depending on the exact psychology and circumstances of the person.

Monday, June 9, 2025

09 June 2025 - Thoughts

  • Today I'm working on post #2 in my series on intellectual virtue. This will examine the words of Michael Huemer.
  • Yesterday I posted quotes and some responses to Joe Schmid's words on intellectual virtue. I'm basically in total agreement, especially with the idea that virtue is the foundation of critical thinking. Where does philosophy begin? It begins with psychology, with the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of person who wants answers to philosophical questions, then you are the right kind of person for doing philosophy. If you are the kind of person who wants truth, then there are certain practices and attitudes you will take on to maximize your chances of finding the truth and ensuring that you are not stuck in falsehoods. 
  • Disagreements: I will probably take a different approach to defining virtue, and I also clashed somewhat with the idea that there is always room for rational disagreement (even on complex topics). Depending on how we define rationality, rational disagreement is not possible; at least one person believes on the basis of false reasons. But you cannot blame someone for believing on the basis of false reasons, especially when the person is not believing on the basis of intellectual vices like wishful thinking or social pressure.
  • There are two senses of blame here. On the first sense, you cannot blame anyone at all ever for any of their beliefs, because you cannot blame someone for their intelligence, knowledge, and so on. We do not choose our beliefs and we do not choose what makes sense to us. On the second sense, you can "blame" someone in the sense of acknowledging that there is something this person lacks. Some kinds of believing will reveal more of a lack than others. There is rational disagreement in the sense that people can disagree without lacking anything other than knowledge, which doesn't speak badly about the person qua truthseeker. Other kinds of disagreement involve a lack of intellectual virtue, which does speak badly about the person qua truthseeker.
  • I had written some on tribalism in general and tribalism within Christianity, inspired by Joe's remarks on tribalism, but those writings have been lost. I think the gist of what I had to say was that 1) Tribalism involves us-versus-them thinking, echo chambers, socially reinforced beliefs (believing not because something makes sense, but because you will be socially punished otherwise), sophistry (saying words for the effect the words have on others, not for the truth of the words), heuristics, group psychology, ego, defensiveness, identity, group identity, doing things not because they are good or true but because they help the tribe and help your standing within the tribe, and a number of other pernicious things that I don't currently remember. 2) Tribalism thus causes intellectual vice and thus impedes truthseeking. 3) Tribalism is a problem that cannot be solved because humans depend on tribes for their survival. Even being a truthseeker runs the risk of falling into tribalist traps with "us truthseekers vs those irrational non-truthseekers" way of thinking. 4) The closest to a solution is to be radically socially independent. But this is impossible in most cases. Either you depend on family for survival, or you depend on a job. Both cases involve social structures and social structures are tribes. Survival and (philosophical) truthseeking sadly come apart in many ways, which is why humans are so overwhelmingly bad at philosophy. 5) You can try to select or procure a tribe that is the least tribalistic, but it's hard to see how tribalism can be fully eliminated. Being aware of tribalism and selecting or procuring a tribe in a strategic way can mitigate or even eliminate some of tribalism's worst effects. But how far can that go? It seems to me that tribalism is a fundamental feature of human nature. You could say that ego death is necessary to defeat tribalism. But how can someone undergo an ego death and continue living in this world as if you are concerned about your own survival? To live just is to live as a surviving thing, a thing concerned about its survival. How can you both undergo an ego death and be a thing concerned about its survival? 
  • I will discuss virtue more broadly when I get to Aristotle.
  • After this series I would like to do a brief series on Plato and Aristotle. That will be quick to put together as I've already done most of the work.
  • I have Huemer's new book on knowledge, so that's on the to-read list. I will probably go into knowledge after mistakes and autonomous facts. Some things to discuss there: a priori vs a posteriori knowledge; analyticity vs tautology; laws of logic; justification.
  • I gave a definition of justification that said a belief is justified when there are good reasons to believe it. Reasons are answers to why questions. I also said explanations are answers to why questions too, and so reasons and explanations are connected. (On one reading of 'reason', reasons are more internal, something the self is aware of. On a reading of 'explanation', explanations are external, existing independently of someone's awareness. There's an explanation for why fire is hot even if no one knows it. But there is an externalist reading of reasons too.)
  • This means there's probably some way to reconcile explanationism—the view that knowledge is when you believe something because it's true—with the view that justification is based on reasons.
  • Both explanationism and justification-by-reasons can probably be reconciled with some kind of foundationalism, and indeed might depend on some kind of foundationalism. I'm aware that Huemer is a foundationalist. I find the view attractive, as alternatives like skepticism and coherentism seem mistaken.


Sunday, June 8, 2025

Intellectual Virtue #1 - Joe Schmid on Intellectual Virtue

The Majesty of Reason (2020)
 
"Tribalism is the dogmatic and weaponized adherence to the principles and beliefs of a social, political, or ideological group." (7)
 
"Tribalism underpins so many of the problems plaguing humanity. The devaluation and systematic murder of religious, social, and racial groups in parts of the world is fueled by the dehumanization of those outside one's ideological tribe. Tribalism is no trivial matter; its pernicious effects are witnessed on scales ranging from interpersonal communication to systematic genocide." (7)
 
"There is no doubt that the ingrained shortcomings of human nature are partially responsible for this tribalism." (7)
 
"We have lost sight of the very purpose for which dialogue and discussion exist in the first place, the very treasure upon which we base our intellectual pursuits: truth." (8)
 
"Without a recognition that truth is our aim, we see interlocutors not as fellow explorers on a journey towards a common treasure, but as villains with whom we must compete to gain status, pride, and ego-gratification." (8)
 
"Rather than fundamentally alter human nature, then, as an antidote to this dire ideological situation, the solution is a mutual recognition that we are fellow explorers who can learn from one another and seek the beautiful treasure of truth together as an enterprise of curiosity, respect, and love. It is only through valuing and loving others, encouraging critical and reflective thought, and aiming ourselves toward truth that we can solve the polarizing problems afflicting humanity." (8)
 
"How do we, as explorers, as seekers, proceed on this journey? . . . The first step on our journey lays the foundation for the ensuing steps. It equips you with the intellectual virtues and conversational tactics necessary for critical thinking. . . . Without cultivating the dispositions of curiosity, humility, open-mindedness, a love for truth, and more, a proficiency in argumentation is groundless and without direction." (9)
 
"The foundation of critical thinking is virtue. Virtues are (i) stable traits or characteristics that (ii) one develops through acts, habits, and character formation with (iii) some intrinsically valuable telos (end, purpose, goal). A morally virtuous person consistently strives for the telos of moral perfection through continued action and habituation towards doing good and avoiding evil. An intellectually virtuous person consistently strives for truth and greater understanding through various habits of the mind – intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, and so on." (11) (Emphasis in bold is mine.)
 
"Here is a brief survey of some of the most important intellectual virtues that will serve as the foundation for the rest of the book (and, hopefully, for the rest of your life)." (11)
 
Emphasis in bold is mine in the following quotes: 
 
"Being intellectually humble involves recognizing the limitations of your knowledge and abilities. . . . intellectual humility is the willingness to say 'I don't know,' . . . and 'I might be wrong' in the appropriate circumstances." (11)
 
"Intellectual curiosity refers to the flaming passion . . . one has for discovering truths . . ." (11)
 
". . . intellectual perseverance is a committed rejection of intellectual laziness. Those with intellectual perseverance see barriers, hardships, and obstacles in their intellectual life as challenges to be overcome and opportunities for growth. Instead of giving up their pursuit of truth when it gets tough, they dig even deeper into the issues . . ." (12)
 
"Developing intellectual responsibility is a matter of taking charge of your pursuit of truth. Intellectually responsible individuals try to minimize deferring their beliefs to the hands of authority figures; instead, they seek to equip themselves with justification, arguments, evidence, and reasons." (12)
 
"Being open-minded is not a matter of believing that every single alternative position is equally probable. On the contrary, it is the willingness to examine such alternative positions in order to critically evaluate their rational and evidential merit. Being open-minded is all about a willingness to consider alternative viewpoints and to recognize, where appropriate, that one's own position might be mistaken." (12)
 
"We are all susceptible to confirmation bias – the tendency to selectively attend to . . . evidence that support[s] . . . our pre-existing beliefs and downplay . . . evidence that contravene[s] them. But a genuine love – dare I say adoration – for truth can help combat confirmation bias. Don't make defending a position your primary aim in intellectual pursuits; instead, make discovering truth your foremost goal." (12-13)
 
Schmid goes on to give us tips for productive conversation. He writes,
 
"Intellectual virtues are, once again, the foundation of critical thinking. However, they provide little guidance on how to have productive, fruitful, truth-oriented conversations . . . Intellectual virtues are all about directing oneself . . . to the telos of truth. But conversations are a step beyond that, since they implicate others in the pursuit of truth. Intellectual virtues are about action; conversations are about interaction." (13)
 
He continues: 
 
"It stands to reason, then, that the intellectual virtues will be limited in their utility when it comes to conversations. For this reason, I've compiled a number of tips . . . useful in facilitating the productive exchange of ideas." (13)
 
I will briefly paraphrase the 22 tips given (note that when I give verbatim quotes I am not necessarily quoting the entire tip):
 
1) Don't judge people for being biased for their current views. Work to mitigate bias, but don't view it as a personal failing when bias is a universal feature of human nature.
 
2) Emphasize agreement over disagreement.
 
3) Recognize that you and your interlocutor are on the same team with the shared goal of getting closer to the truth.
 
Question: This is not always the case. If you suspect that a person is not a genuine truthseeker, what do you do then? Avoid conversation with them? In some cases that's impossible, such as when confronted by friends and family on issues. Folks who lack intellectual virtue are, by all appearances, not truthseekers. I suppose the only thing to do then is preach the good news of intellectual virtue. If that doesn't go anywhere then there's no point in conversation at that point.
 
4) Be prepared to learn from your interlocutor. Don't enter a conversation expecting only to show off your superior knowledge.
 
5) Say you don't know something when you don't know it.
 
I would add: It's okay to use language like: "I'm aware of X topic / idea / author / book / paper, but I still need to research it and think more about it." Or, "While such and such is not clear, these other things are clear, and we can deal with the unclear stuff later."
 
That way you don't let your ignorance just hang awkwardly in the air; you acknowledge it and acknowledge a path forward for how you can deal with that ignorance, and acknowledge the bits of knowledge you do have around the gaps. You can also refocus the conversation and say "I don't know X or such and such is not yet clear, but that's not relevant to the task at hand." 
 
6) "It's okay . . . to be certain on some positions, but it should be somewhat rare." (14)
 
I have wondered whether one could make sense of a certain view of certainty where you can be certain and yet still open to changing your mind. The default view is that if you are certain then that just means you are not open to having your mind changed. But on another view of certainty, to say I am certain of something is just to say that I currently cannot imagine being wrong about that thing. I'm willing to entertain arguments for an opposing view because maybe they will change my imagination.
 
This way you get to have it both ways: you can be both certain and open-minded. Example: I am certain that if you have two objects, and combine them with two more objects, then you will have four objects. I cannot imagine this not being the case. But if someone believes differently (say, a nominalist who believes that truthmaker maximalism is false and that there are no truthmakers for mathematical statements), then I'm willing to hear them out because they might change my imagination.
 
7) Create a respectful environment where truth and love take center stage.
 
8) Place yourself in the shoes of your interlocutor and humanize them, and try to take on their point of view to better understand why they believe as they do.
 
9) "Ditch the caricatures."(14) Don't let stereotypes affect the way you treat your interlocutor. Here I think of how Christians can be stereotyped as ignorant and irrational, and atheists can be stereotyped as selfish and evil.
 
Does this mean Christians have to reject Romans 1 when dialoguing with atheists? 
 
NRSVUE: "18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse . . ."
 
How can Christians "ditch the caricature" when the Bible itself caricatures atheists? "God has made it plain to them"? "they are without excuse"? Also, it's straight up false that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth." If we take this meaning more generally, how much propaganda, lying, deception at the hands of businesses and governments has gone unpunished? There is a lot of suppression of truth out there, but I don't see one iota of God's wrath.
 
10) Avoid echo chambers and immerse yourself in varying viewpoints and ways of thinking.
 
11) Focus the conversation on exploring ideas rather than exposing the mistakes of your interlocutor's view. Your goal should be discovering what's true, not "defeating" an opponent.
 
12) Try not to score points or "win" a debate. Instead, aim for mutual understanding.
 
13) Modify your language to deescalate tension. I would add: avoid accusatory statements, which often begin with the word "you." Instead, use "I" statements and focus on what you believe and why. Try to avoid placing your interlocutor on the defensive or making them feel attacked.
 
14) Be virtuous and aim for truth and love.
 
15) "Try not to sew your worldview or position into the very fabric of your own being. Your value is not tied to the positions you take. If you can (at least temporarily) separate yourself from the position you take, arguments against the position in question won't be seen or felt as personal attacks." (16)
 
a) I can imagine keeping a distance to the odd philosophical argument or position. It's harder to imagine keeping a distance to your entire worldview. But that is exactly what's required – after all, your worldview could be mistaken, and to test your worldview you must step outside of it and subject it to critique as if an outsider.
 
However, there are some positions that cannot be separated from the self. The view that there is a self, for example, which is a (surprisingly) controversial view, cannot, as far as I can see, be separated from the self.
 
b) I would argue that your value is tied to the positions you take, which is exactly why so much is at stake in philosophy of religion discussions. Our value is at stake! If I am an immortal being who will live forever in a blissful heavenly realm, then my value is infinite. But if I am a mortal being who dies and stays dead forever, then my value is finite. [This is why there is so much at stake in metaethical discussions too! Some folks argue against value realism. –01 July 2025]
 
16) Be a good listener and be fully present and not distracted. "If the occasion is right, re-state the point made by your dialectical partner. This shows that you are genuinely listening to them, which de-escalates tribalism. Also be sure to ask, respectfully, 'Is this what you mean?'" (16)
 
17) Philosophy is best done slowly. I would add: it's okay to go over the same concepts, ideas, and arguments over and over again in philosophy. In philosophy ideas are worth revisiting time and time again. There's always something to add or correct.
 
18) Steelman, don't strawman. I would add: this is what it means to place yourself in your interlocutor's shoes and try to see things from their point of view. This is also known as charity, where you interpret your interlocutor's position in the best of lights. Defeating a strawman means nothing. It's only when a view, in its best form, is shown to be mistaken that you can rationally reject it.
 
19) Speaking of charity, be charitable! How extremely frustrating is it when someone construes your words to mean something horrible that you didn't mean? Don't do that.
 
20) Maintain civility and respect. If this cannot be done, then walk away from the conversation.
 
21) Do not psychologize your interlocutor. 'Psychologizing' refers to when you try to explain why someone believes what they do by psychoanalysis. This involves dismissing the reason and evidence given for their view.
 
Recently I saw an example of this mistake made by Lee Strobel, where in an interview he talked about how famous atheists had poor relationships with their fathers, suggesting that we can psychologize atheism away as a result of "daddy issues". This is a mistake because it ignores the very real arguments that atheists, and naturalists more broadly, have offered for atheism and naturalism, arguments that Lee Strobel certainly has not come close to defeating.
 
I think psychologizing is perfectly fine, and even necessary for explaining human behavior and belief. Where it becomes a "fallacy" is when the psychoanalysis is just straight up wrong. If an atheist is convinced that the problem of evil succeeds, then the correct psychoanalysis will involve the intellectual experience provided by an argument from evil.
 
Atheists make this mistake too: they will say that Christians believe what they do because of wishful thinking. That fails to account for the fact that at least some Christians believe Christianity is true because they read the New Testament and are convinced that what they are reading is true history, that Jesus really did die and raise from the dead, that Paul really was visited by God on the road to Damascus, and that the authors of the New Testament accurately recorded what happened, at least accurately enough to justify a general Christian belief that God exists, sent Jesus to die for our sins, and resurrected Jesus as a sign of the resurrection to come for those who place their faith in Jesus. [In fact, you could accuse atheists of wishful thinking – wishing that they would not be judged by God for their moral failings. -01 July 2025]
 
I would add: one of the worst mistakes you can make as an interlocutor is, sadly, one of the most common mistakes, known as 'mindreading' or 'gaslighting' (this applies to psychologizing too), which is when you assume you know someone's inner mental life better than they do, or you assert yourself as a greater authority of someone's feelings and beliefs than they are. It can be a form of gaslighting because it involves trying to make someone appear confused about their own mental states; it basically amounts to an accusation of self-deception or failure of self-understanding. It's similar to "putting words in someone's mouth".
 
Christians can make this mistake because of Romans 1, which suggests that non-believers either really believe there is a God, as creation makes it obvious that God exists such that there is no excuse for non-belief, and that non-believers are somehow deceiving themselves or failing to be honest about why they really reject God, or non-believers are just really stupid (somehow in a way that morally implicates them).
 
Again, we see how the Bible gets in the way of being intellectually virtuous. This verse in particular is problematic. It appears to commit the Christian to engage in the worst mistake you can make in informal reasoning where you assume to know your interlocutor better than they know themselves.
 
22) "Arguments are not weapons and are rarely knock-down. Recognize room for rational disagreement." (17)
 
I agree that 1) you should never use arguments as weapons to attack someone or bully them or insult them, and 2) that arguments are rarely so strong that they guarantee the truth of the conclusion, because the premises can almost always be challenged. But I'm not sure there is always room for rational disagreement, depending on our definition of 'rational.'
 
Let's say I become convinced that arguments from evil succeed in showing that it's incredibly unlikely that a perfect God exists. It would be very strange for me to admit both that 1) God very likely doesn't exist and 2) There is no mistake in believing in God. If God likely doesn't exist then of course there is a mistake in believing in God.
 
If I believed in God and then stopped believing because of arguments and evidence, then clearly I am saying to myself that there are good reasons to doubt God's existence such that it would be irrational for me to continue believing. The "for me" caveat is key. Maybe it's consistent to say that it would be irrational for me to believe in God given what I believe about arguments from evil, but I don't have to believe that it's irrational for other people to believe in God because their beliefs don't commit them to the same conclusions as mine do.
 
However, surely I believe that the reasons why I have the beliefs I do, and thus the commitments I do, are good reasons, reasons worth having. Good reasons are, perhaps among other things, true. If someone says "I believe in God because God is necessary to make sense of the origin of consciousness, the universe, and biological life", those are only good reasons to believe if it is in fact true that God is necessary to make sense of those things. If those claims turn out to be false, then they turn out to not be good reasons.
 
Whether someone is rational, on one interpretation, comes down to whether that person has actually good reasons, and thus true reasons, for why they believe as they do. If we believe philosophy allows us to discover truth, then we should be prepared to say that philosophy allows us to discover which reasons were good or bad all along, and thus which positions were reasonable or unreasonable all along. If I change my mind on God's existence, then I am admitting that the reasons for believing in God were not good even while I believed. Those reasons turned out to not be good after all, which is why I later changed my mind and lost belief in God. It just sounds to me like a straight contradiction to say both that there are no good reasons to believe in God and that belief in God is rational.
 
There is this sense in which I wasn't irrational for believing in God: When I believed in God, I wasn't believing out of wishful thinking (actually, I think that was a part of it, but not the whole story), but I was believing out of what makes sense and what I thought must be true. I thought that the idea of the world being a total accident didn't make sense and that therefore there had to be a creator. That is, in a sense, a reasonable view. I was believing on the basis of arguments, in an intellectually virtuous way, which made it more likely that I would be believing what's true or at least capable of uncovering and correcting my false beliefs.
 
I agree that there is room for rational disagreement in this sense, in the sense that you can't blame someone for believing as they do. More specifically, you can acknowledge problematic, intellectually vicious ways of believing (these are, in a sense, blameworthy) in contrast to reliable, intellectually virtuous (blameless) ways of believing. You can acknowledge that there are intellectually virtuous (blameless) people on opposing sides of a debate. But that doesn't mean one side isn't more reasonable at the end of the day. What we are trying to discover is exactly that: which side is the one with better reasons to believe. Just because you are blameless doesn't mean you are not ignorant or mistaken.
 
The problem is that 'irrational' is so often used as an insult. So for the sake of productive conversations, it's best to never accuse someone of being irrational, or to accuse someone's view as an irrational view. Instead it's best to focus on reasons: I believe such and such because... and "What reasons do you have for thinking that that must be true?"